PwC appointed to manage next digital census

Big four consulting firm PwC has been appointed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to deliver the online platform for the 2021 census, on the back of the bureau's spectacular failure in 2016.

PwC will operate the digital national survey on Amazon Web Services (AWS), while recruitment firm Adecco Group has been hired to find 30,000 temporary field staff who will help people lodge their census forms physically should they choose.

The appointments come after ABS' attempt at conducting the census online in 2016 was bungled, with #censusfail trending on social media at the time.

IBM had been contracted to provide the online survey via private cloud infrastructure, but the census was taken offline after a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which forced the hand of the ABS and IBM due to data security concerns.

Privacy priority

In this year's budget $38.3 million was directed to the ABS thanks to "issues arising from the 2016 census".

Acting ABS deputy statistician Chris Liberi said PwC had a wealth of experience in managing and protecting sensitive personal information.

Michael McCormack was the minister in charge of the 2016 Census. Dominic Lorrimer

"Keeping people’s information secure and confidential is the highest priority for the ABS. It was a key factor in the digital services selection process and a critical consideration in the design of census activities," he said.

The comments come after privacy concerns were raised in the lead-up to the botched 2016 census about the decision by the ABS to retain all the names and addresses it had collected for four years rather than 18 months, in order to enable government planners to do more-rigorous studies of social trends. Following the bungle, there were also fears that people would have given false answers due to worries about the privacy of their data after the DDoS attacks.

To ensure citizens' data is protected, the ABS said on Friday it and PwC would work with agencies such as the Australian Cyber Security Centre and the Digital Transformation Agency to build a secure solution, capable of managing high levels of website traffic.

The ABS has used AWS' public cloud services before, having worked together to execute the 2017 same-sex marriage survey for Australians abroad who could not participate in the postal vote.

AWS cloud services are also used by agencies such as the Australian Taxation Office, IP Australia, the CSIRO, Emergency Services Victoria and Landgate.